An analysis of the wireshark capture trace running on my PC (see below) shows that the company firewall solution checks the Internet Browser version. If it detects an old version of a browser then the access is forbidden.

Stylus studio 10 activation is based on http and (probably) mimics an old browser.

Hi Daniel,
Stylus Studio doesn't impersonate any existing browser; its agent string explicitly says "Stylus Studio" in it. Can you ask your IT environment to add an exception for such a string, at least for the time needed to activate your license?

I'll try to ask the IT deparment to allow the activation. What would help me a lot if you could tell me how often StylusStudio "checks" the activation server. Only once at installation time? If so then I think it is easier to argument with them.

In the long term it is unfortuantly not so simple. The IT logic goes like this:

- browsers in general are unsafe and have security wholes
- by checking for each http request if an up-todate browser is used they can ensure that no PC can get infected from a malicous website because of a browser which is not up-to-date
- this is done with a product called esafe (http://www.aladdin.com/eSafe/) which checks the content. If the user agent does not match what IT-policy allows then it rejectes the packet:

I checks (probably) the User-Agent field in the http protocol
which returns:
User-Agent: Stylus Studio - *the* XML IDE\r\n

Hi Daniel,
Stylus Studio needs to contact the server just once, to perform the check on the activation key provided (btw, Stylus should be run by an administrator when doing this, or the result of the operation will not be properly stored in the registry).
During the normal usage of Stylus, it can check if an updated version is available, but this can be stopped via an option.
However, if you try to load files from the web (either using FTP or HTTP), the same problem will be present.
As for using a different user agent, that has at least two problems: a) we would be stating something false b) if your software periodically deprecates old versions of the leading browsers, the problem will reoccur again.